Seeing the dramatic differences in scores just going from high to xhigh is just another demonstration of the bitter lesson: Just keep scaling search and learning.
We are probably going to need a lot more GPUs.
GPT-6 is supposed to be using a much larger base model that just finished pretraining so the "dump another chunk of all written language" approach is still going strong.
Modern pretraining also consists of expensive human-led specialized task creation and grading loops. Synthetic generation and distillation from previous models is another input for training. I wonder how much new text contributes beyond keeping knowledge up-to-date.
A lot of data these days is synthetically generated. As an example, to make a model good at understanding assembly you simply need to round-trip code through a compiler and disassembler, then train against the source of truth and the assembly. You can generate arbitrary algebra expressions and have it solve it.
A lot of pretraining is also choosing the right type of data, you don't want to just have it ingest garbage (although I read that some amount of garbage actually helps the model be more robust). Pretraining crystallizes a lot of the inductive biases that post-training builds on, so by crafting the right data mixture you can make it easier for it to start off with a good foundation. There is also a lot of focus on mid-training these days, which I understand is basically either the name for the synthetic data stage, or the SFT phase before all the RL
Not sure where I implied they are "raw base models" and not sure what "various adjustments" means here or how "ton of RLHF" contradicts anything. If we look at research for open source models, "adjustments" usually come in the form of efficiency gains which directly contributes to the ability to scale or synthetic data pipelines to increase the dataset and increasing the context window.
Not just RLHF but also RLVR, and isn't that the litter lesson though?
My sense of the Sutton Dwarkesh interview was that he was calling out that he didn't mean just longer datasets, but rather learning through exploration and that's exactly RL.
The scaling with reasoning models is more and more with things like verifiable rewards (coding and math), in line with bitter lesson and also Sutton invented lots of modern RL.
Nah, the last few generations have more RLVR in the data mix. Which is more CPU intensive and very much amenable to the bitter lesson as you can reduce the loss by doing more rollouts in your tool environment.
While I think this is true, remember as we get more efficient we just decide to scale even bigger. So more GPUs, and more efficient.
I agree with the sibling comment, effiency is probably the more important component at this point. We are hitting not just a practical engineering roadblock for scaling with current technology, I think we have definitely hit a financial and logistical roadblock for up scaling with the number of GPUs (on an immediate basis)
Sam Altman was saying we'll eventually need to build a dyson sphere. We'll see how far human society can withstand this kind of escalation. I'm guessing one more year before there are major fractures in the basic economic/social/political relationship that get so bad it actually prevents more buildout.
I actually think we're in a strange situation with AI compute.
Right now, we have models that are statistical models of language, with a world model and reasoning "falling out" of a lot of effort.
It's like we've made something that's a little bit intelligent, and now we're trying to amplify that trick to create something that's quite intelligent. And - don't get me wrong - it works.
But it's also super, super inefficient. We're having machines "think out loud" to compensate for the quality of their thought processes. We elongate the path to make up for the progress made on a given step.
I tink there's probably a much smarter way of doing things that will require qualitative architectural (and quite possibly hardware) innovations. Right now we're on the path to a Dyson sphere: that's probably not going to be necessary once we figure out a smarter way to think.
I agree. But I think you're missing that LLMs can internalise a lot of the thinking process in their layers without explicit CoT. That System 1-style reasoning is bounded depth computation but very, very broad. Yudkowsky called it "cached thoughts" and I think it's an incredibly important idea [1]. It's really stiking how the best LLMs don't even need to think where smaller LLMs do.
So as more thinking is cached in their weights through increased RL training, those weights are doing more useful work and the efficiency is increasing.
Kind of refreshing though that the "throw more processing at it" scaling we saw in the 90s has returned in a different way. For a while we were really bottlenecked in our advances by relatively low levels of parallelism (most software used by your average user doesn't scale cleanly with more than a few threads).
Not always, in some cases, changing to a higher reasoning makes the AI doubt itself too much, and skip over the correct answer by overcomplicating the problem and polluting the context.
It would be nice to see on which categories of problems the extra thinking makes it better and on which it makes it worse.
This shows up in OpenAI's graphs on their announcement page. There is a peak performance datapoint in the graphs past which (to the right on the graph indicating more resources spent) peformance declines. And it's on every graph on that page!
Moreover we've known for quite a while now that glial cells also participate in cognition and moderate learning (e.g.: [1]). When you take those connections into account the numbers get really staggering. 85 billion glial cells with trillions of protein channels facilitating communication between the glial syncytium [2].
The real question is not how many "weights" the human brain has (neurons+synapses may or may not translate into "weights", and brain might be also inefficient for what it is), but rather how much evolutionary and social "compute" was necessary to pack everything into that capacity.
It’s still 20W. We have living proof what is possible within 20W. The message has always been clear - try to get silicon computer to be as power efficient as the brain is as it is obviously possible.
I keep thinking about the cyborg chicken mechs in Metal Gear Solid 4. If stuff like Neuralink gets advanced enough, we might find that cutting up animals and sticking electrodes in their brains is the best way to make robots.
Yeah, people might object, but it can be argued that we are already subjecting scores of animals to horrors beyond comprehension just to get a bucket of chicken wings. And even if we manage to get silicon to do what brains do, it will likely cost 1000x as much and consume 1000x the power like you said.
I think you're helping GPs point: there is a lot of efficiency gains to be made to match the processing power of the brain, given it's size and power draw.
For intelligence, I expect the next breakthrough to be colocation of memory and compute in the same chip. And we'll need much more of this memory, probably a few petabytes.
I mean, theoretically you can solve every finitary problem with a brute force solution...
Richard Sutton specifically states that the search has to be smart. We know that the brain uses recurrent connections and is shallow. I think a lot more money has to go into architecture. Feed Forward transformers can only scale so far
This isn’t really how it works anymore. Agents rely heavily on tool use and the agentic harness to perform tasks. Pre-training is no longer very effective.
I said a few months ago, "man, Opus is great, but sometimes when talking with it I have the feeling like, this thing should be about 10 times bigger."
When Mythos was announced after that, I was pleasantly surprised to hear about it. But when it turned out to be only two times bigger, I was a little disappointed!
(I am even more disappointed with the safety filters, but that's kind of a separate discussion... "Fortunately" I find that I can usually edit my prompt by single character and get through...)
